The Conservative Reader

Tories and the working class; Critical Race Theory in schools; children viewing violent porn; Brexit troubles; Labour myths; stopping the Channel crossings; alternatives to cognitive elitism.

We think conservatives need to talk more and get better at sharing ideas. So here we share the best newspaper columns, policy reports and books that will stimulate thinking and promote new ways of doing things.

The Conservative Reader is published every Friday lunchtime, so please do look out for it. And expect plenty of content about the things we think make conservatism such a compelling body of thought: identity and belonging, community and commitment, market economics, national resilience and good government.

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Best wishes, Nick and Gavin

Towering columns

James Frayne says Labour is still struggling with working-class voters, but they should be the core target for the Tories:

It was often said the coalition the Conservatives established was unsustainable. At its most basic, apparently because working-class voters wanted a bigger state and higher taxes on the rich and big business, while the Southern posh wanted Thatcherism.

This was way over-done. What bound this group together was they all work and are therefore reliant on a salary and ultimately a stable economy. From the mid-2000s, Labour’s support came increasingly from public sector and third sector workers, and those on welfare; while the Conservatives’ support came to rely on private sector workers and retired workers.

As such, the Conservatives increasingly became a “workers’ party” (not a cliché in this case) with working-class voters at the heart of their electorate. This ought to have been a relatively cohesive group to speak to; the Party somehow never managed to make this work.

Matt Goodwin says American-originating Critical Race Theory, with its doctrines of white privilege and systemic racism, is now mainstream in our schools.

A major new research report … confirms what I have long feared for a while —Critical Race Theory is now going mainstream in British schools. Based on extensive new survey data, the report, by Professor Eric Kaufmann —who joins us for an hour-long discussion about his research on the podcast this week — not only finds that large majorities of eighteen year olds have been exposed to CRT concepts in school but they are increasingly viewing the world around them through a CRT lens, embracing many of its underlying claims.

Among 18-year-olds in Britain, remarkably, he finds that a striking 63 per cent have been taught or heard from an adult at school about central CRT concepts such as “white privilege”, “unconscious bias” or “systematic racism”. And if the focus is expanded to include radical feminist ideas such as “the patriarchy”, or the claim there are many different genders, the figure jumps to 78 per cent, reflecting how these ideas are now becoming deeply entrenched in the education system.

Miriam Cates says the Online Safety Bill must act to halt the epidemic of children viewing violent porn:

So it is imperative that we legislate to protect children. However, the Online Safety Bill in its current form has several weaknesses to be addressed. Firstly, the Bill should tighten – and accelerate – age verification requirements. Secondly, it must give equal treatment to dedicated pornography sites and social media platforms on which user-generated porn is distributed. Lastly, there is a clear disparity between pornographic material that is illegal offline (where strict rules about violence apply) and online (where anything goes). If extreme pornography is considered too obscene to be allowed offline, it must be banned online too. 

Pornography may once have been seen as a private matter, and any attempt to regulate it was resisted as an assault on civil liberties. But to be a conservative is to believe that everything has limits. There are limits to how much personal freedom we can enjoy and how much privacy individuals can demand before our choices have intolerable consequences for wider society. We have unquestionably exceeded those limits when it comes to children and pornography. It is time for a (strengthened) Online Safety Bill to redress the balance. 

Roger Bootle argues the Brexit dividend is yet to appear, but there is still all to play for:

What we can be sure of, though, is that there have been hardly any economic benefits from Brexit. This isn’t very surprising. Most economists who supported Brexit, including yours truly, believed that in the first few years there would be net losses as there would be some reduction in trade with the EU as a result of the introduction of various frictions following our exit from the Single Market. Meanwhile, the potential positives would take time to develop.

They certainly have. In anticipation, there were three main possible economic gains from Brexit – saving our annual budget contribution; being able to strike Free Trade Deals (FTAs) with countries around the world on terms favourable to our interests; and being able to reshape the regulatory system away from the excessively intrusive EU regime fashioned in the perceived interests of the continent.

As things turned out, we undoubtedly gained from something quite different, namely having a more nimble approach to vaccinations than virtually all members of the EU. But we could have followed this same path had we remained a member – although we probably wouldn’t have done so. And as for the conventional economic benefits, they are still very much a work in progress. It is true that stopping the payment of our annual tribute to the EU will be enjoyed every year in perpetuity. As things stand, however, we are still making contributions to the EU.

Dominic Sandbrook says Labour must avoid three populist myths that bedevil the party and embrace Starmer’s dullness.

In Labour’s case, this means a rose-tinted and often utterly wrong-headed fixation on its one truly significant period in office, the Attlee government of 1945-51. At Labour conferences, you can often see plenty of people wearing T-shirts asking “What Would Clement Do?” Well, what would Clement do? Serve as Churchill’s deputy? Send troops across picket lines to break a dock strike? Set up Nato and commission a nuclear bomb? Send British troops to fight in Korea? Yes, that’s what Clement would do, because he did.

Back, though, to Starmer. Can he break the losing streak? Can he succeed where Hugh Gaitskell, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn so conspicuously failed, and follow Ramsay and Clem into the Palace to kiss hands with the King? Given the polls, you’d be brave to bet against him. Indeed, whatever you think of him — and personally, I’d happily never hear another word from him as long as I live — there’s no doubt that he wants it. His slow-burning betrayal of Jeremy Corbyn, his abandonment of his own Brexit position, his ruthless moves against his own Left wing: these are the hallmarks of a politician who’s absolutely serious about winning power. Even his shameless posturing about private schools seems very cleverly calculated, a bit of populist red meat to throw to the loonies.

Perhaps above all, Starmer has the one quality that most recent Labour leaders have lacked. He is dull — and not just dull, but excruciatingly, soul-crushingly boring. That infuriates his hard-core activists, just as Attlee’s taciturn caution infuriated their predecessors in the Forties. But the facts of history are pretty clear. Nobody can lose an election like an interesting Labour leader. And if the Baggies of British politics have their hearts set on a championship charge in 2024, perhaps they should be grateful to have a manager who’s not afraid to grind his way, whatever it takes, to a boring 1-0 victory.

Wonky thinking

In a report for the Centre for Policy Studies, Nick Timothy and Karl Williams set out a plan to stop the Channel crossings, by detaining and removing illegal maritime entrants to their home country or Rwanda or another territory. To do so, however, almost certainly means leaving the ECHR:

As long as Britain remains a signatory to the [European Convention on Human Rights] and bound by the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, governments will be prevented from adequately enforcing immigration laws. Some believe that scrapping the Human Rights Act – which incorporates the ECHR into British law – and replacing it with a British Bill of Rights will allow us to better balance rights and responsibilities. In some cases, they may be right. But we are sceptical that the proposal will work. There are, as listed above, a variety of measures ministers can take to limit the legal impediments to the implementation of the Rwanda policy. But as long as Britain remains a signatory to the ECHR and subject to the jurisdiction of its court in Strasbourg, such changes will be challenged in the courts. The replacement of the Human Rights Act by a British Bill of Rights will not prevent claimants making Convention-based appeals in British courts, and they will remain free to petition Strasbourg regardless of the content of any domestic legislation. In particular, the Government will be unable to remove the requirement to assess the individual circumstances of all removals to Rwanda without leaving the Convention.

This would not be a straightforward process. Article 58 of the ECHR permits signatory nations to withdraw from the Convention after giving six months’ notice. Primary legislation would be needed to repeal the Human Rights Act. There would be ramifications for the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU and for the Good Friday Agreement, which lists the ECHR as one its safeguards. One option is to ensure that the ECHR, and the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court, continues to apply insofar as it relates to the Good Friday Agreement. A further option, which would help with the Trade and Cooperation Agreement and Good Friday Agreement, is to produce new legislation replacing the ECHR in British law. This would almost certainly be necessary anyway, given the need to fill the vacuum left by withdrawal from the Convention by providing a clear direction to the courts. This legislation could incorporate all the articles of the ECHR, but make clear that Parliament would be free, when it came to policy, to determine the interpretation of the rights, and the balance between them. British judges would be responsible for interpreting those rights in individual cases.

Book of the week

Our choice is this week is Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century by David Goodhart. The author of The Road to Somewhere, Goodhart traces the declining fortunes of the British working and lower-middle class in an increasingly globalised world. As Western economies have become increasingly dominated by demand for cognitive skills (“Head”), he argues that practical and relational occupations (“Hand” and “Heart”) have fallen in status.

Seventy years ago, just after the Second World War, when we lived in somewhat less complex societies, the people who ran government and business were generally brighter and more ambitious than the average - as they still are today. What’s different is that, back then, skills and qualities other than cognitive-analytical intelligence were held in higher regard. Education had not yet emerged as the main marker of social stratification. In the 1970s most people in rich societies left school with no qualifications at all and as recently as the 1990s many professional people lacked university degrees.

In the language of political cliche, the “brightest and the best” today trump the “decent and hardworking”. Qualities such as character, integrity, experience, common sense, courage and willingness to toil are by no means irrelevant, but they command relatively less respect. And when such virtues count for less it can contribute to what social conservative critics call a “moral deregulation” in which simply being a good person is not valued, and it becomes harder to feel satisfaction and self-respect living an ordinary, decent life, especially in the bottom part of the income spectrum.

Without us really noticing, something fundamental has got out of kilter. As I write at the end of April 2020, it is too early to tell whether the Covid-19 crisis will contribute to a better balance between aptitudes based on Head, Hand and Heart. But we need one…

Quick links

Backbench rebels have forced Michael Gove to U-turn on housing targets.

The Government’s Schools Bill has been dropped.

NHS England’s waiting list is now over 7.2 million.

Charities fighting the Home Office Rwanda plan have received £203 million in taxpayers’ money since 2017.

There were 9,641 alcohol-related deaths last year - a 27 per cent increase on 2019, and the highest figure on record.

More than half of children leaving the care system have a criminal conviction by 24.

China has abandoned its zero-Covid strategy after major protests.

Seb Payne is the new Director of Onward.